The corporate phone is dead. Long live BYOD.

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March 08, 2013 1:55 PM

The latest comScore US market share figures came out this week and one thing was apparent: The two companies-- BlackBerry and Microsoft -- that want to be your corporate phones are doing badly in the US, and both are on a downward trend neither appears to be able to reverse.

It got me thinking that perhaps the whole notion of a corporate phone, one that gets handed out to each employee as part of the orientation package, is just a dead concept -- at least in the US.

Phones running Windows Phone 7 were first released in the US in May 2011. Windows Phone 8 was released in October 2012. In spite of having promoted these phones intensely and offering a decent choice of hardware, especially the Nokia Lumia line, Microsoft's US market share numbers remain abysmal. It's stuck at around 3 percent and dropping slightly every month.

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Credit:Ron Miller

While Microsoft showed off an impressive lineup of Windows Phones at CeBIT, so far sales have slow in the US.

This is in spite of the fact that the Nokia booth at Mobile World Congress was hopping (partly because of the free food, mind you), Yet in spite of some apparent interest in Europe -- the numbers from one study had Nokia at 6.2 percent in Europe, double the US numbers -- Nokia doesn't seem to be gaining significant traction in the United States.

Credit: Ron Miller

In spite of coming out with a decent phone in the Z10, there is little reason to believe BlackBerry will gain significant US marketshare.

Then we have BlackBerry, a company that in spite of its dire straits (or maybe because of them) didn't even have a booth at Mobile World Congress, although it did demonstrate its phones at a couple of press events before the conference began. I got a chance to see and try the Z10 and I was impressed with what I saw, but it doesn't appear to be enough.

In the most recent comScore numbers, which (to be fair) cover the period just prior to the release of the new Z10 and Q10 phones, BlackBerry continued its downward trend that started in 2009 when BlackBerry controlled 40 percent of the US smartphone market. Since then it has been like the old Bruce Springsteen song, a rider on a down bound train, losing market share steadily every single quarter, bleeding away until this most recent report when it dropped from 7.8 to 5.9 percent.